Post Independence Day musings.... flag burning????

To my mind [please avoid thoughts of our venerable Prof. Panda], there are three levels of a society's maturity:

Level I:

Allow the people to hoist a flag whenever and wherever they want.

Level II:

Allow the people to use the flag whichever way they want (like: turn it into T-shirts, Caps, Neck-ties, Aprons, Under-garments etc. and sell them commercially.)

Level III:

Allow the people to burn, tear, mutilate, disrespect or desecrate the flag whichever way they want.

It took India 52 years of Independence to attain the first or primary level of maturity. On January 15, 2002, a young and aspiring scion of a famous industrial group in India, Naveen Jindal, won his long-drawn legal battle against the Government of India and the Supreme Court of India. It was a tireless battle that he fought for 10 years single-handedly, and finally the Central government issued an Executive Order, giving "freedom" to all Indians to fly the national flag whenever and wherever they want.

In stark contrast, the United States of America had already achieved its third level of maturity (flag-burning) by the virtue of its great Constitution that allows liberty to a common man to desecrate the flag as a form of protest (his freedom of ex-pression.)

The American people made widespread use of this freedom of ex-pression during the Vietnam war, and protested against the atrocities of the war by burning their national flag on the streets. As a natural political response to these protests, exactly 40 years ago, the U.S. Congress passed a "Flag Protection Act". Almost all of the 50 states too followed quickly with similar Acts to protect the flag.

But the U.S. Supreme Court systematically dismissed all such political attempts to bypass the "freedom of speech" enshrined so deeply in the U.S. Constitution.

The strong and consistent stance of the U.S. Supreme Court has left their government with only one option: to amend the Constitution (i.e., to demolish the letter and spirit of the Constitution) and take away the citizen's freedom to desecrate the national flag. Almost every year now, the U.S. Senate attempts to get this amendment passed, but fails to attain the required majority votes favouring such amendment.

With each passing year, the noises favouring the amendment continue to grow louder, and the gap between conservatives (read: hypocrites) and liberals continues to narrow. The most recent attempt for this constitutional amendment was made in the U.S. Senate last year in June, 2006. The attempt failed by just one vote.

EPILOGUE:

Once America achieves this amendment, it would lose its "maturity advantage" over India.

Though it would not be that India has suddenly leap-frogged in terms of maturity. It would simply be that America has finally decided to go back to its medieval roots of slavery.

Once that happens, India and America would have become gigantic equals at least in one critical sense -- immaturity.

So what if they couldn't become equals in maturity.